1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to information processing technologies for generating, editing, and printing documents formed of text or images. More particularly, the invention relates to an information processing technology for generating, editing, and printing variable data documents.
2. Description of the Related Art
The life cycle of commodities is becoming shorter because of the wider variation thereof, and due to the widespread use of the Internet, consumers are demanding more customized services. Because of these recent trends, the need for customer relationship management (CRM) and one-to-one marketing is becoming greater. This is one approach to meeting the needs of each customer and also to developing new customers and keeping them.
One-to-one marketing is one type of database marketing. In this marketing, personal attribute information, such as the user's age, gender, hobbies, favorites, and purchase history, is formed into a database and is analyzed to make suggestions to meet the customer's needs. A typical approach of this type of marketing is variable printing. Due to the recent progress of desktop publishing (DTP) technologies and the widespread use of digital printers, a variable print system for customizing and outputting documents for individual customers has been developed. Accordingly, it is demanded that the layout of content for different customers be optimally formed and displayed.
Hitherto, in this system, to form a customized document, a layout is formed on a document within a container (also referred to as a “field area” in a document form), and the layout is associated with a corresponding database. In this case, since the size of the layout container is fixed, a large amount of text data exceeding the fixed size cannot be completely displayed in the container. If such data is image data, it is displayed at a size smaller than the original image, or if it is displayed at the original size, the data cannot be completely displayed in the container.
To solve the above-described problems, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 7-129658 (paragraph [0049] and FIG. 8) discloses an automatic layout technique in which, when the size of a container is large, the size of the adjacent container is decreased. Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2000-155795 discloses a document recognition technique for checking an input image against a document form.
In the two publications described above, however, layout checking in an automatic layout system is not discussed. In the above-described variable print system for dynamically controlling the layout of a container in a field, to design an optimal template for all records, a certain record is selected to form a template. However, to check whether the layout of the template is suitable for other records, the operator must switch records to visually check the template. In this case, to check whether the layout is suitable for all records, the operator's visual check is required for each record. If the number of records is large, for example, 10000, the checking operation is very time-consuming.